“In most wargames, an individual soldier is exactly the same at the end of a fight as he is at the beginning of it, unless he’s been hit”, muses Nick Denning, but “Even on a day where we didn’t take a scratch, I wasn’t the same guy at the end of it as I was at the beginning”. The former infantry commander served two tours in Afghanistan with the British army, and that experience is a massive factor in the design of his upcoming game Foxhounds, an indie miniature wargame for fast-playing modern and near-future battles. Wargamer caught up with Denning to learn more about his life, and how Foxhounds flips many orthodoxies of miniature wargaming on their head.
Now retired from the British Armed Forces, Denning spent two seven-month tours in Afghanistan in the summers of 2007 and 2012, first as a rifle platoon commander, then as an embedded advisor in the Afghan national army. You can find out more about his experiences on the Company of Makers podcast, embedded below. Since leaving the forces he’s worked as a consultant and project manager in the construction sector, particularly focusing on civil engineering projects – but miniature wargames are his “happy place”.
Work on Foxhounds started in 2021, and was inspired by the birth of Denning’s second daughter. “Life was only getting more complicated, and I wanted to keep playing, and I wanted to be an active participant in the genre”, he says, “I was trying to make the game that I wanted to play and that I had time to play”. Keeping the game quick to play was a cast-iron design goal, and one that drove him to make some bold choices
In many games “morale and leadership are bolted onto the combat rules”, Denning states, with morale systems a sideshow that only impacts units “if they get knackered enough or weathered enough”. In Foxhounds, a unit’s Combat Effectiveness – an abstraction that covers everything from supply levels, to equipment, to fatigue, to casualties – “governs pretty much everything”.
CE continually fluctuates, and not just as a result of taking damage. “You pay to activate [units] using their combat effectiveness, representing fatigue, and when they get hit, they lose combat effectiveness, representing damage”. CE is also used as a currency for building armies, and as a limited pool of reinforcement points that your army commanders can use to restore degraded units.
The intent is that the Combat Effectiveness system can naturally a rhythm of combat similar to NATO doctrine. “We call it the power of three”, he says, “In a rifle platoon, there are three sections; in an American equivalent, there are three squads in a fight. One will be giving the covering fire, suppressing, another will be assaulting, and one will be in reserve”. When the assaulting squad takes a position “it will come under fire from an enemy depth position, and they will become the suppressor. What was the reserve becomes the assault, and those people that were on fire support will replenish their magazines and become the reserve”.
Aside from their fluctuating Combat Effectiveness, “every unit is either fast or slow, their weapons are either heavy or light, and their armor is either soft or hard”, and there are some universal special rules that help differentiate units further. This isn’t a game that models the difference between an RPG and a LAW, or different models of assault rifle – but Denning thinks the abstraction is an acceptable trade-off for the speed it gives to the game.
“Generally speaking, if a bullet hits the person, it’s a bad situation, and the combat effectiveness of that squad or section drops immediately”, Denning says. “Equally when an armored vehicle gets hit by a heavy munition, the combat effectiveness of that vehicle will change immediately, perhaps while the crew put it into reverse and bring it back into into cover and check everything’s okay, or whether they wait for the dust to clear in front of the windshield of a Humvee”.
Foxhounds is a mixed-arms wargame focused on current and near-future sci-fi battles, with a suggested 6mm scale. It’s miniatures agnostic, and the only real requirement for miniatures is a way of tracking the Combat Effectiveness of units – Denning uses tracking dials in model bases.
Despite the near-future setting, which is often an excuse for designers to include extensive arsenals of speculative weapons platforms, Denning has focused on representing the primacy of basic infantry. Denning says that in many games “standard infantry only makes sense as a sort of a meat shield, or an ablative wave of low quality troops” – which completely misrepresents the reality of battle. “These are the guys who are going to hold objectives, and they’re often the only people who can clear objectives”.
He’s speaking from experience. “Until you’ve been in that compound, or you’ve been in that building, or you’ve been in that trench or bunker or whatever, you haven’t cleared it”, he says. “Woe betide the people that go, ‘Oh, they’re probably gone, let’s just walk on’ – that never, never goes well”. In Foxhounds, an infantry unit might be degraded to the point it has almost no combat effectiveness, but it can only be removed completely by a direct assault from another infantry squad.
The current rules for Foxhound are available for free from the Company of Makers website, a not-for-profit that is funded by Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust to run creative projects with veterans. “Their mission is to connect veterans with creative pursuits so that… they might be more likely to speak their mind and open a pathway for some sort of welfare intervention that they or a friend might need”, Denning explains.
After discovering Company of Makers via a questionnaire, Denning initially approached the organisers with the idea of starting a community for veterans who wanted to try designing their own games. They loved the idea, and suggested that Denning’s own game should be its first focus. There’s now a core playtesting crew of six people, and CoM has assisted Denning with exhibiting Foxhounds at UK wargames shows – you’ll be able to catch it at Salute in April.
Company of Makers has run a wide variety of projects with veterans, but its most recent one focuses on miniature wargames and has been extremely successful. I ask Denning what it is about wargaming that makes it so appealing to veterans. “As soon as you’re trained in tactics and operational concepts, you’re obviously preparing to use them throughout your time in the military”, he says. “Once you leave, you leave a life in which you’re spoiled for choice in terms of accountability and decision making, all of a sudden you’re some middle manager or consultant or something like that”. Wargaming offers the “opportunity to run out those synaptic links again”.
“There’s something that you miss about that very unique kind of decision making which relates spatial concerns, timing concerns, and – if you’re a leader worth his salt – human concerns as well – what am I asking of my soldiers?” He sees that last question as central to the design of Foxhounds: “What are you asking of your troops? Can you actually sustain this plan? Is this going to work, or are you just running a body of people into the ground?”
You can get the Foxhounds rules from the Company of Makers website, whether or not you’re a veteran of the armed forces, and you can follow it’s development on Denning’s Instagram. If you try it out, we’d love to hear what you think of it in the Wargamer Discord community.
Source: Wargamer
